I would like to contribute to the conversation by sharing a few thoughts.

First, I think it is important to be clear about what we mean when we refer to the concept of vulnerability.

In what follows, I will refer to vulnerability, not as a matter of personal or situational adversity. Rather, I will emphasize its structural nature and how it is embedded in the very systems, policies, and institutions that govern our societies.

Consider migrant workers who suffer exploitative labor conditions or women targeted by persistent gender-based discrimination and violence. Immigration laws that tie the right to enter a country and stay to an employment contract, weak enforcement of labor protections, wage gaps in undervalued sectors, and inadequate responses to gender-based violence are all examples of how structural vulnerability operates.

Following this preliminary note, I would like to explore the critical role of legal clinics in addressing the needs of socially vulnerable groups through three different key words.

The first word is the word bridge.

As Legal clinics bridge the gap between lived experiences of injustice and formal legal frameworks, favoring a critical approach to the law. They create spaces where both academics, practitioners and students are encouraged to interrogate the systemic biases, power dynamics, and historical inequalities embedded within legal systems. This critical perspective is essential for challenging laws that perpetuate injustice under the appearance of neutrality.

Beyond critique, clinics offer also a space for participation in reimagining law, inviting those directly impacted by systemic injustices to co-create legal strategies and solutions. This participatory approach recognizes the epistemic advantage of lived experience—understanding that those who experience one situation of prejudice often possess unique insights into the law’s failures and the pathways for its transformation. By integrating these perspectives, legal clinics can embrace a feminist participatory research agenda and contribute to enhancing the role of the law as a tool for social justice and systemic change.

By doing so clinics can give voice to marginalized groups within the legal system, translating broader social grievances into specific legal claims. Drawing on social movement theory, the concept of frame alignment describes the process of connecting individuals’ experiences with broader narratives that resonate across societal and institutional levels. By aligning the stories of vulnerable individuals with legal and societal frameworks, clinics amplify their voices and support collective action, while transforming their experiences will long lasting impact.

The second word is legitimacy.

As Legal clinics ground research and teaching in real-world challenges ultimately reinforcing the social legitimacy of universities. Universities are often critiqued for prioritizing research outputs that are not useful to the communities they are part of. Clinics on the contrary illustrate how academic expertise can be mobilized to tackle inequality and improve access to justice. We know that clinics are not merely spaces where academic knowledge is “applied” to external problems but are collaborative spaces where real life experience enrich academic understanding. This reciprocal exchange enhances the relevance of university research and teaching. Instead of producing knowledge for the communities they are part of, clinics produce knowledge with this communities.

While offering students an educational experience that is both practical and transformative clinics also reinforce the role of universities as a key pillar of a democratic society. In a time of growing skepticism about the relevance and accessibility of higher education, legal clinics provide a compelling model for how universities can reassert their legitimacy in relation to both their students and the wider community, especially the socially marginalized.

The third word is the word democracy.

As the role of legal clinics becomes especially crucial in contexts of democratic backsliding that threatens the very role of law as a tool of democratic governance. Authoritarian or semi authoritarian regimes and populist leaders often frame courts as biased, ideologically driven, or out of touch with the will of the people. Ethno-populist groups have successfully promoted a narrative of courts as unaccountable institutions dominated by powerful and disconnected elites and exploited public sentiment to legitimize themselves as representatives of majority interests. They have created additional threats to the legitimacy of courts, by publicly refusing to implement their decisions. This narrative has driven mobilization against courts consisting of state action affecting the governance of courts and judicial independence or of action from a broad range of actors—governments, domestic courts, NGOs, legal professionals, academics, and business actors—aiming to limit access, influence the development of case law, and preclude or inhibit compliance.

These developments affect everyone, but have a disproportionate impact on marginalized groups, who rely on courts as essential venues for asserting their rights and challenging injustice.

Clinics can be part of a wider network of actors committed to responding to this trend promoting a couter-narrative that emphasizes the courts’ essential role in safeguarding democracy, while monitoring attacks on the court system.

At the same time, clinics can be viewed as spaces of democratic deliberation where socially vulnerable groups are heard and everyone has the chance to participate in an exercise of visualizing a shared horizon which, as Alan Supiot writes, is “both a limitation and an indication of a ‘ought-to-be’ that saves members of society from solipsism and self-referentiality”.